


Won't Happen Again

by SylvanWitch



Series: Proving the Exception [1]
Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Coulson!Lives, Fuck Or Die, M/M, Soul Bond, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-10
Updated: 2013-03-10
Packaged: 2017-12-04 22:06:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/715624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is no way to be <i>accidentally</i> Bonded.  A true Bond takes three levels of deliberate words and actions, requires total and equal commitment from the bondmates, and cannot be done casually.</p><p>Or, Phil and Clint are big damned heroes who manage to defy expectations yet again.  Color no one surprised.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Won't Happen Again

**Author's Note:**

> So I was thinking about how much I enjoy a good soul bond fic and how it might be done a little differently, and then I was thinking about how much I love the fuck-or-die trope, and then those two ideas got blended, and voila! Fic happened. Just because they're cliches doesn't mean they aren't awesome. ;-)

The First Bond is accidental.  

Or rather, it’s an accident that Phil is hanging by one hand from the edge of a very tall building that’s just started rocking on its foundations as though it’s made of Legos and not reinforced concrete and steel.

This building wasn’t supposed to be in the blast zone.  He was supposed to be safe, unflappable in the perch Barton had chosen for him, a place just outside the wave of chaos from which Phil could control the ebb and flow of the mayhem SHIELD itself dealt out.

Phil isn’t controlling anything but his breathing at the moment, though.  Mostly, he’s considering his odds.  The chances of him catching the ledge with his other hand, the one dripping blood thirty-three stories to the distant ground below, are poor.  His left arm’s been mangled and he can’t really feel much in that hand, so he abandons the idea of getting any help out of it and instead says, “Barton, what’s your twenty?”

Barton answers with a grip around Phil’s wrist that startles him into letting go, but it’s okay because Barton is pulling him onto the roof, rolling them both away from the edge so that when they stop moving, Phil’s half in Barton’s lap and Barton is cradling Phil’s broken arm against Phil’s chest, in his embrace strength and life and something more, something…

“Shit,” Phil murmurs, and the expletive alone tenses Barton against his back.  Coulson doesn’t swear in the field.  Or in his office.  Or at all.

Unless things have gone to, well, shit.

“Sir,” Clint says low into Coulson’s ear.  “This building’s going to go. We have to move.”

And Phil’s not imagining the fearful wonder and impossible hope warring in the undertones of Clint’s admonition, just as he’s not imagining the warmth flowing up from the place where Clint is still holding his wrist, the wrist Clint had just used to save Phil’s life—holding it with bare fingers, fingers communicating the First Bond as clearly as if Clint had just said, “I take this for mine,” and Phil had said, “I offer this to you.”

Apparently, some stories about the Bond aren’t true.  Like that you need to speak aloud the invocation.  Or that you need to mean it in the moment, fully and consciously own it, before it is invoked.

Because there’s no doubt that they’ve just forged the First Bond between them, not with the way Clint’s warm breath on Coulson’s neck cascades in shivers down his spine and along every single nerve, driving out the pain of his broken arm and the stomach-dropping sensation of the building’s now alarming rocking.

Maybe neither of them intended this, but it’s happening.

They don’t have time, though, to talk about it, or even to consider its barest implications.  Clint’s already helping Phil sit up on his own, moving out from beneath him, tucking Phil’s left hand behind his belt to do what he can to immobilize the broken arm, and slinging Phil’s good arm over his broad, steady shoulders.

After they’ve made it to safety, after Phil’s arm has been set and cast and Clint’s scrapes and bruises have been tended.  

After they’ve been debriefed—Clint in the chair beside Phil’s bed, Phil in the bed, Hill using the ubiquitous rolling hospital table for her workstation.

After their official status has been tapped into Hill’s tablet with a few nonjudgmental keystrokes.

After the nurse has offered pain meds and Phil has refused—again.

Only when the floor grows as quiet as any hospital floor can and Clint is slumped in his chair, exhausted, and Phil is letting himself at last relax into the pillows, considering sleep.

Only then does Clint ghost a fingertip along the scraped knuckles exposed by the cast on Phil’s broken left arm.

Phil sucks in a breath, dizzy with the sensation, and looks at Clint, whose own eyes are tracing the movement of his fingertip like he can somehow discover the secrets of the universe in that single, mindful touch.

Then Clint’s finger is gone, and Clint is sitting up straight, pulling his tired spine into order and squaring his shoulders and looking back at Phil with the closed, professional expression Phil recognizes for the bluff it is.

And Phil doesn’t call him on it.  Can’t.  They’ve always had this thing between them, unacknowledged but no less real for being silent, and they’ve always danced around it with the ease of a practiced couple.

The jokes in the mess about their “coffee dates,” the secret betting pool that they both know about, Fury’s unsubtle reminders about team protocol.

Natasha’s smirk, one distinct from all of the others for its fondness and exasperation at their expense.

They work together, Phil and Clint, because they let the feelings go.  It’s not denial.  It’s deliberate.

“Won’t happen again,” Clint promises, and Phil nods, says, “I know,” softly, his tone warring with the careful smile he’s wearing, the one that only Clint would recognize for the warmth it hides from everyone else.

Clint leaves.  Phil heals.  The world continues the way it’s always been.

If they’re a little more careful about casual touches, no one mentions it.

Natasha’s smirk grows a little more exasperated.  Fury’s subtlety suffers a setback when he has to confront them about the First Bond.  

Phil files the necessary paperwork, and they survive the scrutiny and the psych tests, and they head back out to battle evil and hail the conquering heroes home.

The second time, it’s on purpose, and Phil would regret it, except it means that Clint is alive to frown at the new sensations they’re sharing, even without touching, even with the isolation ward glass between them.

When he’d found Clint, the toxin had already taken its toll on Clint’s system, glazing his eyes, sheening him in cold sweat, tensing his muscles so that his lips were clenched in a terrible rictus and Phil had thought he was too late.  

But Clint had been breathing, and though blind and deaf to anything but the stuttering heartbeat pushing sluggish blood through his collapsing veins, he’d felt Phil’s fingers across his throat, searching for the flutter of a pulse, and he’d said, “Yes,” giving up his last breath—what he’d intended for his last breath—so that Phil would know how glad he’d been to have Phil’s touch on him again.

There’d been volition in Phil’s formal words, words he’d spoken against the thin skin of Clint’s throat, as though Phil would urge on that desperate, faltering pulse by the will of the invocation and their intent.

Clint couldn’t hear the words, the world around him shrouded and grey, already receding against the promise of what came next, but he felt the vibration of them against his throat and he answered them, though his throat was too ravaged to make sounds, the breath he’d needed to speak already surrendered.  He’d thought and meant them, not for his own survival but so that Phil would have that, at least, to carry with him when Clint was gone.

He hadn’t counted on the strength of the Second Bond.

As the light around him had dimmed to a pinprick and he’d at last let go of the physical world, Clint had been struck by lightning, an electricity so intense that it bowed his back from the cold floor of his cell, chattered his teeth loose in their sockets, ripped a raw, ugly sound from his bleeding throat.

Surely, every cell in his body had been vaporized, set afire from inside.

Surely, he was in Hell, having at last ended up where his father had always insisted he belonged.

When at last the volcanic heat in his blood had cooled and he could take a full breath without screaming, when comets shooting through his field of vision had turned the room to a swarm of tiny lights, Clint had realized two things:

Phil Coulson’s lips were cool and slack against his throat, his dead weight draped across his naked chest.

And distant gunfire signaled a belated rescue by the SHIELD team Coulson must have called when he’d discovered Clint’s location.

Now, in isolation, Phil stares at Clint through the glass, willing him to understand, and Clint gives him a weary but sincere smile, letting into his eyes all of the things he’s sworn he’ll never say.

It’s not that Clint is emotionally stunted, nor is it that Phil is married only to the job.

They’re grown-ups.  They’ve had their share of relationships, healthy or otherwise.  They’ve numbered their bones and packed away their damage.  They’ve counted scars and stories.  They’ve understood and been understood.

“We can’t do this again,” Phil says through the glass, wanting to touch Clint and glad that he cannot.

“I know, sir,” Clint answers, voice a whispered rasp, like a match-head striking a fire up Phil’s spine.  

“You might be reassigned,” Phil apologizes, clenching his hands into fists to keep himself from flattening them against the glass.  

It doesn’t help.  He can still feel Clint’s pulse on his lips, and he licks them for the umpteenth time, watching Clint’s eyes track the progress of his tongue and practically tasting the weight of his look.

Clint nods, apparently out of words.

Phil leaves.  Clint heals.  The world continues more or less the way it’s always been.

Natasha doesn’t smirk anymore, sadness in her eyes replacing the fondness and exasperation.

Fury demands that Barton be reassigned, and they both refuse with a steadfastness born of equal parts stubborn self-assurance and defiant wistfulness.

They can’t go back to the way it was before, but neither will they let things end entirely.

Besides, as Phil points out, they’re the best team SHIELD’s got.

“And it’s not like I’m going to accidentally fall on his dick,” Clint adds in his inimitable, straightforward fashion.

Clint’s right, of course.  The Third Bond can only be invoked through full physical and emotional mutual consummation.

“No tangos,” Fury commands, and they nod dutifully.

Tango is SHIELD code for an operation that requires a pair of operatives to feign a relationship.  It makes sense that Phil and Clint avoid that sort of mission, and it goes without saying that they aren’t going to tango with anyone else, either.

No one asks them, and they don’t offer.

It works.

It works because they’re stubborn and strong and stoic.  Because what they do is more important than who they are.  Because they’re capable of keeping things to themselves without it feeling like they’re hiding anything from each other.

And it works because Clint doesn’t drop by Phil’s place anymore and Phil doesn’t spend time watching Clint at the range.

Because they don’t fill the comms with idle chatter anymore, Clint’s baiting observations and Phil’s patient rejoinders.

Because they don’t share a room, with two beds or with one, on ops, and because when they’re inevitably injured, they don’t bare any more flesh than is necessary to immediately triage and treat the wounds.

It works, in short, because they are consummate professionals consummately good at denying themselves what they want in favor of the greater good.

If that means that there is aching loneliness or that there are yawning chasms of empty time, spans of hours and days when the world seems grey and their own lives incomplete…

Well, they don’t inspect those experiences too closely.  

The third time is so clichéd that they’d almost find it laughable if they had any breath to spare for laughing.

As it is, Phil’s breath bursts across Clint’s sweat-damp neck in hot gusts, and it’s all Clint can do to hold on to Phil’s hips and urge him closer, his cock deeper, the sobbing breath punched from him with every desperate thrust.

Phil’s chanting a litany of Clint’s name and broken apologies, and Clint is blinking against the searing heat of Phil’s cock driving him open, the way it is taking him apart and remaking him even as he resists the Third Bond.

By all the rules of Bonding, the Third has to be a complete annihilation of space between them.

It has to be purposeful, mutual, perfect.

Given that Clint had never imagined them coming together for the first time in a room full of enemies leering and making filthy suggestions, or that Phil had never fantasized about being forced to fuck Clint lest they both die in agony, each watching the other be torn apart by strangers.

Well…  It shouldn’t work.

But of course, it does.

Clint feels the Third Bond forming and tries to stop it, closes his eyes against the enormous swell of love and rightness expanding his chest until he feels like he can’t breathe around it.

Phil stops in his thrusting, holds back against the sensation building in the base of his spine, pooling low in his belly, knowing it’s more than orgasm that wants to spill from him.

But against this they are helpless, every ounce of their will drained by something greater than their individual or collective intentions.

When Phil’s hips plunge again and he lets go, filling Clint utterly with a rightness that tears from him an unbidden cry…

When Clint comes back to himself with wetness on his face from their mingled tears…

When Phil shifts his softening cock inside of Clint and wrings from them both a breathy moan…

They don’t notice the derisive cheers and mocking applause of their unwanted audience.

They don’t pay attention to the percussive rhythm of assault that startles their captors into scrambling for guns and the doors.

They aren’t even aware when Natasha enters the room, Sitwell close behind her, the both of them pausing, taking wide-eyed stock, slipping back out and closing the door, standing guard with their backs to it like latter day wedding attendants who, having witnessed the proof of virtue now defend the couple against further intrusions.

All they know is each the other, shaking hands and easy tears and slowing breaths and the wonder of lips and tongues and touch.

 “I love you,” Clint doesn’t say.

 “I know,” Phil doesn’t answer.  

 What they have now is beyond words.  There is no language but racing hearts and the answering thunder of blood.

Medical can find nothing wrong with either of them, despite the hours of recorded torture discovered on confiscated tapes after the rescue raid.

Natasha can find nothing to smile about.  She doesn’t believe in what they’ve become and has no vocabulary for wonder.

Fury is speechless.  He hands Phil the forms and nods the pair toward the door.  There’s no protocol for this.  Bonded couples don’t make good SHIELD agents.

They prove the exception.

When Clint is taken by Loki, Phil knows.  The place in his core where Clint lives, where he works the bellows of Phil’s breath, goes cold.  It’s not an emptiness so much as an evisceration, and Phil is stunned into a profound stillness that freezes him in place.

Around him, the compound is descending into chaos, but even as an agent shouts in his ear and a second asks him for his orders, all Phil can do is stare, unseeing, unmade.

It lasts a heart-stopping minute, and then the breath stutters in his throat and he’s choking on a scream he refuses to unleash.

His will imposes order while the part of himself that loves Clint Barton curls up and whimpers.  He hasn’t got time to grieve it, though, for the mountain is coming down around him.

When Phil Coulson dies, Clint Barton stumbles and the arrow he was aiming at a familiar face capped by flaming red hair goes wide of its mark.

Something inside of him shrieks, his mouth falling open in a silent keening, breath wrenched from him. If it weren’t for the alien cold taking up the space in his chest where his heart used to be, Clint would die, he knows it.

Screaming without a sound, he tries to use the pain to break himself free of Loki’s crushing grip, wanting nothing more than to follow Phil where he, Clint, can’t go.  But some things are stronger even than the excruciating beauty of the Bond.  Blue flares behind Clint’s eyes and he is once more an obedient soldier, moving toward his target with malicious and sneering intent.

By the time he wakes up in a cold, concrete cell, his will returned but his world annihilated, Clint has missed the moment when the Bond should have killed him.

He’s a hollow man, straw and mold, his voice the cackle of a harbinger crow when he answers Natasha by habit and goes out to give battle on automatic, no volition steering him, just a voice in his ear that is not Phil’s driving home Clint’s enormous and endless pain.

There is nothing of him left.

He’s swallowing a mouthful of dust, food just another assault to add to the growing list of things he resents that prove he’s alive, when something flickers in his chest and he chokes.

He has a half-minute of eye-watering, breathless hope that this ignominious bit of bread and meat will at last put an end to his suffering when he realizes two things at once:

Steve’s blows to the back of his ribs are going to leave bruises.

And Phil Coulson is alive.

Without a word to the others Clint stands and races for the door.

Without considering the distance or the state of the New York streets, he breaks into a run.

Without wondering about the sound of feet catching up to him or the strength of the arms trying to stop him or the whirring of a hammer dropping a god in front of him, Clint dodges and ducks, scales a wall and takes to the rooftops, makes an unlikely leap an impossible distance, clears every obstacle until he’s standing gasping and drenched with sweat, eyes wild in a filthy face, gazing with total focus on the pale, still figure just visible inside a ring of frantically working medical personnel.

Soon there are Thor and Steve, one to either side of him, keeping importunate staff and angry agents away.

Moments later, there is Banner to talk down the looming security and Tony to sneer them into submission, and there is Natasha to clear Clint’s way to Phil’s bedside, and there is Fury’s silent imposition of order as the doctors and nurses back away.

And then there is only Phil’s thready pulse under Clint’s seeking fingers as he closes his strong hand around Phil’s wrist and pulls him back from the edge of that fatal plunge.

“Won’t happen again,” Phil promises a minute or two later, his words barely audible over the confused cacophony of monitors trying to make sense of Phil’s sudden recovery.

“I know,” Clint answers just as softly, lips forming the words against Phil’s mouth.


End file.
